Riordan stung by ‘gotcha’ news

The mob now howling for Richard Riordan’s head almost perfectly exemplifies one of the many things gone painfully wrong in the place where American politics and media intersect.

What has developed into a virtual case study of “gotcha journalism” began innocently enough a little more than a week ago, when the former Los Angeles mayor, now California’s education secretary, dropped into the Santa Barbara Central Library to help promote a summer reading program for children.

As a local television camera rolled, Riordan sat down and read and then chatted with a group of children. One of them, 6-year-old Isis D’Luciano, asked if he knew that her name meant “Egyptian goddess.”

Riordan, whose sense of humor is notoriously antic, dated and frequently inappropriate, kidded back: “It means stupid, dirty girl.”

There were titters of nervous laughter. The poised and patient little girl politely corrected the visitor.

“Hey, that’s nifty,” he replied. Riordan subsequently apologized and, later, after parents of some of the children present complained, issued formal regrets. His boss and longtime friend, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, called the exchange “unacceptable in any context” but said through a spokesman that he doesn’t want Riordan to quit.

But as story followed story and column followed column, the furor grew. In contemporary public life, a verbal gaffe that turns into a seven-day story has become something else and, by week’s end, this tempest had boiled right out of its teapot.

On Thursday, an editorial in the Sacramento Bee declared that “California shouldn’t have an education secretary who makes offensive, damaging remarks to young children for no apparent reason.” State Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) declared that Riordan has been so damaged by the affair that Schwarzenegger ought to reconsider his suitability for the post. “People just shake their heads and wonder if there’s something wrong with him,” she said of Riordan.

Then came the attempt to racialize the incident. It would be nice to call it “the inexplicable attempt,” but as classic “gotcha” stories develop, it was depressingly predictable. Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally (D-Compton) organized a group of civil rights groups to protest Riordan’s remark at the Capitol on Thursday. As Dymally told the San Jose Mercury News on Wednesday, Isis was “a little African American girl. Would he have done that to a white girl?”

Inconveniently, Isis D’Luciano happens to be white.

No need to belabor here the kinds of stereotypical assumptions that would contribute to the automatic conclusion that a girl named Isis must inevitably be African American. In any event, once this bit of racial profiling was exposed for what it was, the assemblyman bowed out.

Not so Alice Huffman, president of the California State Conference of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, who said that Riordan “is not suitable to lead education in our state.... We understand that Mr. Riordan was among the governor’s first appointments. Today, we call upon him to do what is best for the people of California and remove Mr. Riordan.”

By Friday, the story had gone national, with accounts on CNN and other outlets. At late morning, it was a featured item on the Drudge Report with Riordan’s picture over a caption that read, “Furor grows after Riordan calls six-year-old ‘stupid dirty girl.’ ”

The only cool head seemed to belong to Isis’ mother, Trinity Lila, who told Associated Press that her daughter hadn’t taken the secretary’s quip personally. “I’m not going to sue him for therapy bills,” she said, adding that her daughter hadn’t wanted “to hurt his feelings. I got the impression she didn’t think he was very bright.”

Riordan, Lila said, has “already apologized repeatedly. I don’t see what else is to be done.”

Here’s what makes this whole ridiculous sequence a “gotcha” incident. This writer spent four years dealing with Riordan as the Los Angeles Times’ city/county bureau chief. As anyone else who has ever spent time around him can attest, he has a quirky -- frequently unsuccessful -- sense of humor. What he never acquired during his eight years of elective office and subsequent run for governor was the conventional politician’s habit of inauthenticity.

For better or worse, Dick Riordan is always and everywhere himself.

Sometimes that produced what those who covered him liked to call the millionaire mayor’s “Marie Antoinette moments.” For example, the night he bristled over questions as to why a particular businessman had donated tens of thousands of dollars to Riordan’s effort to rewrite the City Charter when the donor did no business anywhere near Los Angeles. “He’s a friend of mine,” Riordan snapped. “Besides, it’s not that much money. Shoot, if I have people over for drinks, I could collect that much from underneath the cushions on the sofa.”

On the other hand, Riordan is also the man who has made children and their education a deeply personal concern of his public and private life. He has given thousands of dollars from his own pocket to support candidates he believes will promote educational opportunity and reform. His family foundation has quietly given millions to put computers and other tools of scholastic advantage in the hands of poor, mostly minority schoolchildren.

But, at a vigorous 74, he is a man of a certain age, and men of his generation routinely used kidding as the acceptable way to show affection for children. If others know better than to do that now, then so much the better for all of us. And if little Isis took his remark in stride, it’s probably because she recognized Riordan’s brand of humor for what it is: childish.

What it isn’t is a window on anything more significant. That’s the essence of a “gotcha” story: The reaction is never about what actually happened, it’s about issues other people have with the subject’s policies. Lots of people disagree with Riordan’s notions about education, but those differences deserve to be fought out on the merits and in the open.

That is the essential difference between this story and others superficially like it -- for example, the controversy that drove Republican Sen. Trent Lott from his post as majority leader. Lott, as you may recall, made an unguarded remark about how much better off the country might have been had his aged colleague Strom Thurmond of South Carolina prevailed in a long-ago bid for the presidency. That remark led reporters to an entire web of associations with neo-segregationists and primitive states-righters maintained by Lott over the years. There are no such skeletons in Riordan’s various closets.

As Isis’ mother put it Thursday, “I let my daughter go to story hour and figured she’d be safe in a room full of librarians and parents and other children and the secretary of education.”

So, apparently, did the secretary. Now we’ve all learned better.